(04-13-2022, 06:48 PM)Lucky2Last Wrote: No, they don't. Very few of us like our politicians. We have more in common with each other than the elite. We are just forced to choose between the lesser of two evils, which we also all hate.

I don't disagree!
Now we are actually getting down to brass tacks instead of chasing ghosts or trying to nail jello to walls like we typically do.

How can we get more and better candidates to run?

How can we encourage the candidates who do run to win by making us happy, rather than win by making us slightly less angry than the other guy?

The political realm can be separated into ideals and materials. Western society has a lot of upcoming challenges in the material realm. Climate change, an aging population, rapid worldwide diffusion of game-changing military hardware such as drones, we could go on.

In the realm of ideas, the internet has rapidly challenged old narratives and created 10 new ones for each old one. No one believes that this is reversible. The only ways to cope with it are by finding and implementing the best possible answers to the two bolded questions above.

You pay a lot of attention to the realm of ideas, and you continually point out to us how dangerous you think some of these new pieces on the game board are. But you can't just kick certain pieces off the board. You can't defeat them with logic or arguments.  In a world with single choice, single winner elections, everyone has to join one of two parties, and each party from here on out forever will have to cater to at least some of these new and dangerous narratives to win.  But in a world with many choice, many winner elections, the loonies run in the open and are clearly separate from the mainstream parties. They gain seats and platforms but never power. This is much more resilient in a pluralistic realm of ideas.

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